John Desmond Bernal Quotes - Page 2

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• As a scientist Miss [Rosalind] Franklin was distinguished by extreme clarity and perfection in everything she undertook. Her photographs are among the most beautiful X-ray photographs of any substance ever taken.

  John Desmond Bernal

  Beautiful, Taken, Perfection

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• The question of the origin of life is essentially speculative. We have to construct, by straightforward thinking on the basis of very few factual observations, a plausible and self-consistent picture of a process which must have occurred before any of the forms which are known to us in the fossil record could have existed.

  John Desmond Bernal

  Thinking, Origin Of Life, Self

  John Desmond Bernal (1967). “The origin of life”

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• The region of the mysterious is rapidly shrinking.

  John Desmond Bernal

  Science, Shrinking, Mysterious

  John Desmond Bernal (1967). “The origin of life”

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• Published papers may omit important steps and the memory of men of science, even the greatest, is sadly fallible.

  John Desmond Bernal

  Memories, Science, Men

  John Desmond Bernal (1953). “Science and Industry in the Nineteenth Century”, p.199, Taylor & Francis

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• The psychology of a complex mind must differ almost as much from that of a simple, mechanized mind as its psychology would from ours; because something that must underlie and perhaps be even greater than sex is involved.

  John Desmond Bernal

  Sex, Simple, Psychology

  "The World, the Flesh and the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul". Book by John Desmond Bernal, 1929.

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• Naturalism aimed at giving the primitive wishes full play but failed because these wishes are too primitive, too infantile, too inconsistent with themselves to be satisfied even by the greatest license.

  John Desmond Bernal

  Play, Giving, Wish

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• Pauling was shocked by the freedom with which the X-ray crystallographers of the time, including particularly Astbury, played with the intimate chemical structure of their models. They seemed to think that if the atoms were arranged in the right order and about the right distance apart, that was all that mattered, that no further restrictions need to be put on them.

  John Desmond Bernal

  Freedom, Distance, Science

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• We will have to give up taking things for granted, even the apparently simple things.

  John Desmond Bernal

  Giving Up, Simple, Taking Things For Granted

  John Desmond Bernal (1967). “The origin of life”

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• Her [Rosalind Franklin] devotion to research showed itself at its finest in the last months of her life. Although stricken with an illness which she knew would be fatal, she continued to work right up to the end.

  John Desmond Bernal

  Science, Would Be, Research

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• In my own field, x-ray crystallography, we used to work out the structure of minerals by various dodges which we never bothered to write down, we just used them. Then Linus Pauling came along to the laboratory, saw what we were doing and wrote out what we now call Pauling's Rules. We had all been using Pauling's Rules for about three or four years before Pauling told us what the rules were.

  John Desmond Bernal

  Writing, Years, Work Out

  "A History of Classical Physics: From Antiquity to the Quantum". Book by John Desmond Bernal, p. 116, 1997.

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• [In eighteenth-century Britain] engineers for the most began as simple workmen, skilful and ambitious but usually illiterate and self-taught. They were either millwrights like Bramah, mechanics like Murdoch and George Stephenson, or smiths like Newcomen and Maudslay.

  John Desmond Bernal

  Simple, Self, Ambitious

  "Science in History". Book by John Desmond Bernal, Volume 2, 1954.

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• The recognition of the art that informs all pure science need not mean the abandonment for it of all present art, rather it will mean the completion of the transformation of art that has already begun.

  John Desmond Bernal

  Art, Mean, Needs

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• The problem [of specialization] is essentially that of communications to an army in action. After a rapid advance communications become disorganized, and there is a temporary halting until they are again in working order.

  John Desmond Bernal

  Communication, Army, Order

  "The World, the Flesh and the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul". Book by John Desmond Bernal, 1929.

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• A part of sexuality may go to research, and a much larger part must lead to aesthetic creation. The art of the future will, because of the very opportunities and materials it will have at its command, need an infinitely stronger formative impulse than it does now.

  John Desmond Bernal

  Art, Opportunity, Stronger

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